Battle of Hyacinth
The Battle of Hyacinth was an armed engagement between a Manticoran escorted convoy and a Havenite task force that was fought in the Hyacinth System at the end of the First Havenite-Manticoran War. Prelude The Hyacinth System was still in Alliance possession when Captain Aivars Terekhov's convoy was dispatched there. It was supposed to be turned into one of Eighth Fleet's forward supply depots, but the picket force covering it was hit by a Havenite counterattack. With the picket lacking any modern ship types and the enemy in overwhelming strength, the Manticoran commander had no choice but to withdraw. When Captain Terekhov arrived with his convoy, he sailed straight into an ambush. The Havenite commander called on him to surrender, but he refused. His ships had latest-generation ECM and FTL communication systems, and the freighters in his convoy were loaded with all the latest technology, including spare parts and multi-drive missiles intended to reammunition Eighth Fleet. Terekhov could not let these fall into enemy hands, so he tried to fight his way out, or at least get the merchantmen back out across the hyper limit. ( ) Order of battle RMN Supply convoy8-freighter convoy, including [[RMMS Handley|RMMS Handley]] and [[RMMS Plasma Stream|RMMS Plasma Stream]] escort - a light cruiser division, Captain Aivars Terekhov commanding: * [[HMS Defiant (light cruiser)|HMS Defiant]] †, Captain Aivars Terekhov commanding * [[HMS Valiant (Valiant-class)|HMS Valiant]] † * [[HMS Resolute (Valiant class)|HMS Resolute]] † PN An ambushing light task group of a picketing task force: * a battlecruiser elementat least two units * a cruiser squadron''Mars''-class units Course of battle HMS Resolute was the first of the convoys escorts to be destroyed after engaging the enemy, as were six of the eight freighters. By that time, Valiant had lost her forward impeller ring and, after taking another complete missile broadside from the nearest enemy battlecruiser detonated simultaneously less than five thousand kilometers off her port bow, exploded as well. At that time, both Handley and Plasma Stream crossed the Alpha wall and escaped into safety. Countermissiles and point defense stopped a number of incoming missiles, but six came through and detonated. Defiant took heavy damageMissile tubes 17, 19 and 20 were destroyed, as were Alpha Node 14 and Beta Nodes 29 and 30. Frames in section 6-9-7 aft were heavily damaged, point defense clusters 25 through 30 destroyed, magazine 4 breached. Laser clusters 17 and 19 were destroyed. and even heavier casualties in engineering and other sections, but managed to launch another set of decoys from her forward tubes and roll to port, executing evasion pattern Uniform-X-Ray and point defense fire plan Horatius, throwing canisters of countermissiles out of the bow tubes. At least two-thirds of the incoming Havenite salvos lost track, going after the decoy drones. More of them were disabled by the countermissiles' impeller wedges. Defiant's defensive fire bored a hole into the dense swarm of attacking missiles, and her surviving laser clusters kept firing: Captain Terekhov steered his ship directly into the overwhelming enemy task force and had the heavy spinal grasers of her forward chase armament locked onto one of the heavy cruisers. They opened fire and managed to destroy the ship, two seconds before the circuitry of Chaser 2 aboard Defiant exploded. The other Havenite cruisers rolled over and presented their broadsides, pouring out large salvos of missles which finally destroyed the ship, seriously injuring Captain Terekhov, who ended up among the few survivors. ( ) Aftermath Captain Terekhov and his surviving crew were taken as prisoners-of-war by the People's Navy. Terekhov himself had been mangled by a fire on his ship's bridge so badly that the Havenite doctors had to amputate his right arm and leg and regenerate them from scratch. After that, he spent almost a full T-year as a POW in the People's Republic until the general prisoner exchange the High Ridge Government engineered. He later received the Manticore Cross for his conduct in the battle. ( ) References Hyacinth, Battle of Hyacinth, Battle of